Nowadays, the US, Europe and Turkey are growing apart. Is their relationship near to a collapse? Do they still share common values? To many observers, populists are to blame for this current trend. They are damaging the liberal world order and mistreating their respective allies. Yet, by analyzing the evolution of the US-Turkish-EU relationship from a historical perspective, one could notice that damaged were already done years before they came into power. For instance, Donald Trump did nothing more than strengthening older differences. Since the demise of the USSR, tensions already arose over the challenges the West had to face: what were the main ones? How to fix them? How should the transatlantic partnership evolve? In the 2000s, differences deepened even further especially between the EU and both the US and Turkey. On the contrary, Washington and Ankara moved ever closer, at least until Erdoǧan severely repressed Gezi protestors in 2013. More fundamentally, it is the Syrian crisis that has been disrupting their partnership, despite earlier tensions in the 1990s between the two allies on the Kurdish issue. Thus, to understand the current crisis, we propose to analyze in this paper the evolution of this trilateral relationship from a historical perspective, before envisioning how it may evolve in the future, and what it would mean for NATO and the European security architecture.
Keywords: US, Europe, Turkey, Partnership, History, European Security
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Margaux Magalhaes | Sorbonne University, Paris III, France